You might think that we have a thriving free legal web of legislation, judgments and other materials on OPSI, the SLD, BAILII and government websites, and thousands of useful free guides, articles and updaters published by law firms, barristers and other private law publishers. But it is not joined up.

We have the resources and the technologies to join it up now for the benefit of lawyers and the community at large and those of us who have an interest in access to the law and justice and the efficient provision of legal services must make this happen.

Encouraged by the recent sea change in the government’s attitude to the provision of public sector information and the support of user-created services complementing government, in August I rashly committed myself to leading the FreeLegalWeb project.

The first stage was a “BarCamp” (a participatory workshop whose content is provided by participants) held in London on 18 October at which 24 enthusiastic souls gave up their Saturday to share their ideas on how we might achieve this seemingly impossible task.

John Sheridan of OPSI described what the government could do to support a project such as ours and the prospective merging of OPSI legislation and the SLD. Joe Ury pointed to tools that could be applied to gain better access to BAILII resources and also clarified the murky issue of copyright in judgments which stands in the way of fully open access to them.

Several barristers, solicitors and students contributed experiences and ideas, particularly as to incentivising others to contribute authoritative content.

Members of the TSO teams contracted to OPSI gave us information on the OPSI programming interface being developed and several others of a technical bent described how lightweight technologies might be applied – in particular, several associated with the mySociety information democracy project who have already done great work with projects related to the cause such as TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow.

In the afternoon four discussion groups considered different aspects of the project in more detail and we ended the day enthusiastically committed to taking it further. Whoever you are, you can help too. Follow the blog at legalweb.wordpress.com for latest news and to see how you can contribute to the project.

Nick Holmes is joint editor of this Newsletter.

Email nickholmes@infolaw.co.uk.